6 Lies That Moms Tell

As a Mom, I tell many lies. Some are little white lies I tell my children just to get them to eat their dinner, like when I say that the little bits of onion in their chicken are little bits of cheese. Or when they were toddlers and I told them that their toy was broken, when in fact, it just needed new batteries.

Now that they’ve gotten a bit older, they’re a little too smart to believe those kinds of lies any more. But that doesn’t mean the lies have stopped. They aren’t intentional, or mean-spirited, but when you’re a Mom, there are times when you are just too angry or exhausted or distracted, and the words come out of your mouth before you’ve had time to actually process whether or not those words are true.

Here are some of the biggest Mom lies I tell my children, and myself:

1. “I just want ONE day without the fighting, whining, and complaining!” This statement is a total lie. Don’t get me wrong; I would absolutely take just one day without that nonsense. But what I really want is ALL of the days. I know this would be impossible, but since I would take just the one day, I should really start by telling my kids I want every day without fighting, whining, and complaining. Then perhaps they’d negotiate with me a little bit and we could work our way down to a more reasonable number of days.

2. “If you don’t clean up your toys, I’ll just toss them in the trash!” While this is partially true since I have been know to throw out toys, I only toss the ones that are either broken or from the Dollar Store (usually they’re both of those things). But I’m too cheap to throw out a good toy that I know I can consign or sell at a yard sale down the road for a decent price. Although none of that matters because my kids still fall for it every time.

3. “Not right now!” I use this one all the time. Of course when I say “Not right now,” I obviously mean “No.” It just buys me some time when I don’t feel like doing whatever it is they’re asking for, or if I don’t feel like arguing with them about why they can’t do whatever it is they want to do. On a rare occasion, they actually forget they asked me in the first place. It’s a huge gamble, but when it works, it’s amazing! The rest of the time it ends up like this:

4. “I’m SO tired!” My husband calls me out on this one all the time. After the kids are in bed, I proceed to do a hundred different things, and by the time I sit down to watch TV with him, he’s half asleep. Then he says, “I thought you said you were tired,” as he drifts off and I stay up and watch TV until past midnight. It’s not technically a lie, because I’m obviously tired. But after the kids go to bed, I can’t just lie down and go to sleep. That’s crazy talk! I guess the real lie here is me trying to convince myself that I’m not tired, which is probably part of the reason I’m always so tired.

5. “I’m going to organize my pictures, print them out, and put them in a photo album!” I don’t know if other Moms tell this lie to themselves, but I do at least once a month. I can’t be sure why I say it, because I know full well that it won’t get done. I guess it just makes me feel good to have some goals that don’t involve folding laundry, keeping the house clean, or washing the dishes. Feel free to replace this with any other outlandish goal that is almost certainly never going to be realized.

6. “There aren’t enough hours in the day.” I say thisall the timewhen I don’t get something done. But I don’t know why I say it. Of course there are enough hours in the day! I just spend most of them procrastinating instead of doing all the things I need to do. What I really need is to heed my own advice and stop doing things like this:

I tell my kids if they just stop whining & clean their room it’ll get done faster.

But saying “there aren’t enough hours in the day” makes me feel better, like lack of time is the reason every piece of clothing my children own are in piles on the couch.

It’s a tricky business being a parent. We teach our children that telling lies is wrong, yet we go on telling quite a bit of lies ourselves, oftentimes to the very children we’re teaching. But most of the time, the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell our children are just a means of getting through each day with our sanity (somewhat) in tact.